Navigating the Market: EdTech Marketing Strategies Every Startup Needs. Best practices

Even though it doesn't mean that the educational industry was boring and purely offline before 2020, digitalization made education more accessible and affordable through online education.

Whether someone likes it or not, EdTech and e-learning will soon take first place in the educational arena. While some people turn to online schools for their kids, adults use online courses to develop and grow their skills in different spheres. 

The rapid growth of EdTech startups and market giants is the driving factor for all the businesses in the education sector to choose more unique and effective marketing strategies in order to stand out from the crowd. That is what we are going to discuss in this article.

Why is Digital Marketing Beneficial for EdTech Companies?

Digital Marketing plays a crucial role in the success of EdTech companies by helping them reach a wider audience, build brand awareness, and drive conversions. In the fast-paced digital world, where technology has transformed the way we learn and access information, EdTech companies need effective digital marketing strategies for EdTech companies to stand out from the competition and connect with their target market. Here are some reasons why digital marketing is particularly beneficial for EdTech companies:

• Increased online visibility and reach to a wider audience.
• Precise targeting of ideal learners, educators, and institutions.
• Cost-effective compared to traditional EdTech marketing methods.
• Data-driven valuable insights for measuring campaign effectiveness.
• Building a strong brand presence and credibility.
• Building and nurturing customer relationships throughout the learning journey.
• Adaptability and flexibility to stay current with evolving trends and technologies.

These key points highlight how digital marketing can greatly benefit EdTech companies like yours. By leveraging digital marketing strategies, you can expand your reach, effectively engage with your target audience, optimize your marketing efforts, and establish a strong brand presence in the dynamic digital landscape.

How to Create a Successful EdTech Marketing Strategy

EdTech startups are similar to any other startup that needs marketing. As could be expected, success in this challenging and competitive market requires more effort from you than you would need with an established EdTech company. For instance, a basic understanding of SEO, keyword research, and target audiences is mandatory, but you will need to invest more time if you want to succeed with EdTechmarketing campaigns.

Those interested in building a strategy that works should consider the base of any marketing campaign. It always includes the following, though it could be customized according to specific needs or EdTech services you have to offer:

Segmentation

EdTech customers usually know what they came for, so they tend to have specific and clear objectives. And they won't work for everyone. So, the first thing to do here is to set up a clear picture of your target audience. To be more specific, you should identify various segments of your target audience by properly segmenting them.

Segmentation is an excellent way to qualify leads and organize your customers based on spending habits, budget, and goals. This will be the base of your marketing strategy regardless of the approach we describe below you choose.

Simply put, the more personalized the marketing campaigns feel for the specific audience, the higher the chances of these leads being converted. People immediately leave the website or scroll through the ad when they see that the message isn't for them, so missing out on a proper target audience isn't a choice in that market today.

Marketing Strategy

Even though the base of the marketing campaign plays an essential role in market success, how you handle that stage is also important. Here you have to:

• Identify your brand's target audience in detail;
• Target segmented clients, focusing on the most profitable ones;
• Identify and showcase the strengths and uniqueness of your online learning platform;
• Show why your product/service is the best solution decision-makers have been looking for.

Developing a detailed customer profile is crucial to knowing how to promote your online classes and what marketing strategy to choose. Make sure you describe the buyer personas as accurately as possible so you won't be confused later.  

Marketing Plan

Once you are familiar with the details of your target audience, including their buyer patterns, demographics, and age (at least), you will need to develop a plan that will help you successfully reach and convert those customers. First of all, you should consider how your target audience may look at the products and services you have to offer.

You should identify where and how they want to explore your content (find forms and formats they prefer the most). Therefore, you should invest more resources into options that are suggested to bring higher potential.

For instance, video content and infographics are the two most vivid examples of formats that the majority of modern customers prefer. A classic B2B customer stage sales intel will work as a good starting point, but the sales funnel should address the following key concerns such as:

• Budget differences;
• Who and what factors can influence an EdTech buyer's purchasing decisions;
• Location-specific concerns like regulations and social climate.

Monitoring and Analysis

Collection, monitoring, and analysis of data are essential to the success of any EdTech and online learning strategy. To be more specific, this is believed to be the only way you'll know for sure which marketing campaigns and strategies, forms of content, and their types are as profitable as you expected. We recommend exploring the following performance indicators:

• Web and video traffic to lead ratio;
• Overall web traffic;
• Lifetime customer value;
• Customer acquisition costs;
• Email open/response rates;
• Retention rates;
• Amount of unqualified leads;
• Overall sales growth.

It is also a great idea to perform A/B testing and use in depth analytics tools for various marketing approaches since it also helps to verify which one delivers the best results for your services and/or products.

Top 10 Marketing Strategies for EdTech

Invest More in SEO

Even though the majority of people today actively search for products and services using the Internet, it becomes even more important when it comes to comparing and making decisions regarding schools, universities, and other educational institutes.

The information and how it is presented that the potential customer finds online will have a huge impact on their decision and the direction they decide to go. In addition, search engine optimization (SEO) is considered to be a cost-effective though promising marketing solution for the Edtech business that don't yet have enough budget to go with more costly options like influencers.

A successful search engine optimization of the website and its content is essential to rank higher, present your company as an expert in the field, attract visitors to your site, and ensure you attract relevant and qualified leads. The more you invest in SEO efforts, the more you" reap benefits. Some of them include:

• Higher quality and more traffic;
• Competitive advantage over other competitors;
• Increased credibility, as high-ranking sites are generally always considered to be the most trusted and relevant sources of information;
• Better learning experience for your visitors, leads, and customers.

Get Back to Email Marketing

Email marketing isn't gone. In contrast to many beliefs, it is one of the most stable marketing channels that can do wonders if properly organized and monitored. Being simple and clear,  can bring qualified leads and allow you to know your audience better - which is crucial for any other type of marketing campaign.

It's also one of the most effective content marketing methods for EdTech companies, as it lends itself very well to segmentation.

Email marketing initiatives are also easy to automate, cost-effective, and strong when it comes to your potential ROI. You can also outsource the task to EdTech marketers. The benefits of making email one of the main marketing channels when you're in EdTech include:

• Cost-effectiveness: The best thing about email marketing is that you don't need a massive marketing budget to put together a stellar email campaign. All that is needed is creativity, quality research, and a solid understanding of your target audience.
• Measurability: It is simple to track, manage, organize, and analyze data related to your email campaigns.
• Customer–centric: Since personalized customer experience is crucial, email marketing makes it easy to separate recipient segments for customer-centric marketing campaigns.
• High convertibility: When properly handled, email marketing can offer high numbers of quality leads and effectively guide other types of customers through a sales funnel.

You can either save money by organizing the process by yourself or hire an email service provider to speed up this marketing technique. 

Benefit From Video Marketing

The start in marketing is video content. Research shows that video marketing accounts for an astonishing 69 percent of today's global web traffic. And it isn't hard to see why.

Videos are highly engaging, easy to consume, quick to share, and incredibly versatile. Videos can also work as an accessible and affordable way to capture a customer's attention, encouraging them to stop scrolling long enough to check out what you have to offer.

Video marketing allows the EdTech business to set up a strong channel that will bring quality leads and convert them into customers. EdTech businesses can use all the platforms that are relevant to their target audience, like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and others.

Using YouTube remains the most cost-effective option. You will have access to more than 2 billion active users, considering half of them as your potential customers. Using private platforms could be costly, though they also have their benefits that you may want to explore before making a decision.

Video editing and localization through AI-powered tools like Rask AI allows EdTech businesses to go global with their products and services through localization. Using Rask means no manual efforts are needed since it can translate videos to over 130 languages, and you can also generate voiceovers to make the content feel as authentic as possible for a vast range of locales. The tool performs all the work, meaning you can invest more time and money in business development.

Manage Social Media Platforms

Let's be honest - the majority of your target audience runs their social networks. So why don't you?

Social media platforms today are the way to express yourself, but for business, it is the way to know the target audience better, attract relevant decision-makers through their preferred channels, and keep them engaged with your content (given it is done properly). Therefore, managing your social media platforms is essential for all businesses, but especially for EdTech companies that need cost-effective EdTech solutions.

It is crucial to ensure that you translate the same message for one target audience. For example, you may identify that half of your target audience will use Instagram to find services and products you offer - so the message should be specified to them. Another half may use Twitter, so in that social media, the message should be different. Remember that personalized experience is what drives the highest sales.

Managing a social media marketing campaign becomes easier by using Rask since it can help you generate numerous Shots from one long video - so there is no need to constantly film and edit small videos that can go viral on TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

This is another marketing strategy that EdTech startups can consider in 2023-2024. Even though a PPC digital advertising campaign should never be any kind of substitute for proper long-run marketing techniques like SEO and video marketing, it still can bring internet traffic when working as an extra method to generate leads.

There are several PPC providers that the EdTech industry can explore. One of the most popular, though, is Google Ads, which has been shown to make it easy and fast to develop highly targeted advertisements with a pretty high ROI (return on investment).

This click marketing is working best as an additional way to drive internet traffic, attracting specific demographics over a relatively short period of time. Here are some factors you should pay attention to:

• Identify specific segments you're looking to reach;
• Timing each ad to organize the highest possible return on your investment;
• Perform comprehensive keyword research;
• Use relevant keywords;
• Word choices that keep ads simple, direct, and effective;
• Choose one from several PPC marketing providers.

Perform a Buyer Journey Analysis

You may not know that the regular buyer journey related to any form of eduation software and other EdTech products is far more complex compared to other types of a product. For instance, more people are likely involved in the process - parents, caregivers, and students themselves (and here we take the simplest version of the case).

That is why knowing the buying cycle and how to accurately nurture all parties involved in the process will be essential in the final decision buyer personas make. Let's quickly go through the basics that might be involved at each stage:

• Top of the marketing funnel (also known as TOFU): Here, you need to make your leads and prospect customers aware of the problem (in case they don't know about it yet). You can present your online classes through blog posts, social media accounts, infographics, and other widely accessible content types.
• Middle of the funnel (also known as MOFU): At this point, you should already begin the converting process focused more on qualified leads. This could involve quizzes, educational technology resources, special discounts, offers, and more can be helpful here.
• Bottom of the funnel (also known as BOFU): Leads who have already stepped into this stage of the marketing funnel are ready to make a decision, so you need to smoothly start offering the product itself, showing how it can solve the problem they came with. This could include demos, customer testimonials, spec sheets, etc.

Content Plays a Crucial Role

Even though the content is what some EdTech companies tend to avoid as they believe there are more things they want to invest in, it is vital to mention that EdTech customers often have a lot of questions and are looking for relevant and solid sources of information. That being said, investing in quality educational content is essential if you really want your decision makers to consider you as a learning provider and an expert in the niche.

Quality content can deliver a great user experience that will help you differentiate your business from competitors. Here, you can not only write blog posts and publish your articles on third-party websites but also consider video marketing, creating an educational YouTube channel (as an example). 

The content marketing strategy should be polished and monitored so you always stay updated on what potential customers like and what they don't based on their position in the customer journey. Do all the work by yourself or use Rask AI to save time and money, scaling content production while maintaining quality.

Consider Pillar Pages

Pillar Pages act as a backbone of effective content marketing for EdTech startups. These represent one of the go-to-market strategies, representing comprehensive, in-depth web pages that work as a central hub for specific learning topics, providing valuable educational information and resources to EdTech customers. 

Creating pillar pages allows EdTech businesses to quickly establish themselves as experts in the domain, dramatically improving rankings and search engine visibility, and attracting a proper target audience. 

Connect with Influencers

Influencer content marketing could be a costly option, so it won't suit any Edtech business out there. However, like in any other industry, lucky ones can still find affordable options when it comes to connecting with influencers. While this content marketing technique is effective in almost any sphere, it is especially promising for the EdTech industry since the target audience of education companies mostly looks for such products and services via social media accounts.

These influencers have already established trust and authority with their audience, so they can organize proper audience engagement. And you can easily attract qualified leads and decision-makers to your products and services through influencers in 2023.

Collaborating with influencers can help tap into niche communities, build brand awareness, provide consistent brand experience, foster meaningful conversations, and develop a strong brand name on the market.

Capture the Audience with Audio Content

Audio content has almost the same customer engagement level as video content. It is also a popular trend in 2023. Audio content that grasps users' attention includes podcasts and interviews, and these two forms of content can be easily implemented into your EdTech marketing strategy. The perfect target audience for this content will be listeners between 12-34 years old. Based on Infinite Dial's 2022 report, half of American podcast listeners are within that age range. 

Edison Research found out that almost 54% of them are likely to consider brands that are advertised in a podcast (given the entire podcast is engaging and informative). EdTech companies can develop interesting content by attracting experts in the niche, offering workshops, etc., so it creates a learning-based experience.  

For example, you can explore this Edtech Podcast as probably the most well-known example of a successful podcast content marketing campaign. Alongside discussing the latest development trends in the niche, this podcast also invites successful influencers and professionals to provide their unique ideas to keep their audiences engaged. 

Final Thoughts on the EdTech Industry

At the end of the day, investing in the quality of your products and services and managing content marketing campaigns plays a crucial role in the success of your EdTech startup. However, knowing what works for your business through testing and implementing the latest trends, like personalization and the use of Rask AI for video editing, can help organize an effective content marketing strategy that really works without breaking the bank.